In September 1984, the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Anaheim released over six hundred people to establish a vineyard Fellowship in nearby Yorba Linda. At that time four thousand people attended the Anaheim Vineyard, so we gave up about fifteen percent of our church. But the figure for the number of people who left reveals only part of the loss to the Anaheim Vineyard and those of us who remained.

Bob Fulton, one of the original Anaheim Vineyard pastors and my brother-in-law, was called as the senior pastor of the new group. He and his wife, Penny (my wife’s sister), had overseen the development of our small-group system. Further, many of the six hundred people who went to Yorba Linda were our earliest converts and closest friends. These included many of the key lay leaders in the church; until these mature Christians and trained leaders were replaced, the burdens of providing pastoral care would be increased. There were new relationships to be formed, young leaders to recruit, train, and deploy – and much hard work ahead of us.

Though it meant new challenges and more work at the Anaheim Vineyard, Carol enthusiastically agreed with starting the new Yorba Linda church. She knew that the new church was one way through which God would advance his gospel in Orange County. But Carol had not counted on the personal hurt that resulted from missed Sunday fellowship with her two natural sisters and most of her old friends. Soon after the new church began, she was struggling subconsciously with feelings of abandonment and loss.

“I was not able to articulate rationally what  was happening inside of me,” Carol now says, “If you would have asked me at the time how I felt, I would have told you, “Great! Never been better.” But in my heart, my innermost part, I was hurting. I also began finding excuses for not seeing my sisters and friends during the week.”

Throughout the summer and into the autumn of 1985 Carol’s feelings of hurt and abandonment worsened. Then one Sunday in October she made an alarming discovery. “I had had a hectic week and was at a low point both physically and spiritually, when I discovered a large, lemon-sized lump in my breast. At first I didn’t know what to do. What if it were malignant? What if I needed surgery?”

That night I prayed for Carol’s physical healing, but with no effect. On Monday morning Carol made an appointment with her doctor for Tuesday. “That night I prayed, asking God what he wanted for me in all of this, “ Carol says. “As I did, he showed me that the lump in my breast was related directly to my feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Until that moment I had not realized how deeply hurt I was. During my childhood I had developed a fear of being abandoned, and I had allowed that fear to control my feelings toward the loss of regular fellowship with my sisters and my friends.”

Carol came to me and told me that she suspected there was a relationship between her past hurt and her current sinful attitudes, and the lump. We did not understand the connection between the two, but we accepted God’s revelation that they were related. So we prayed together, and she sincerely repented of her bitterness. Then from her heart she blessed her sisters and friends and their work in the new church. “the result was like a huge weight being lifted from my soul,” she says. God reassured me that he would never leave me, and I have been more confident in my relationships since then.”

I then prayed again for the healing of the lump in her breast. When I asked the Holy Spirit to come on Carol, I felt a surge of power go through my hands and onto her. “I felt the power of God come on me,” Carol says. “The lump felt warm and numb, then it immediately began to shrink. By Tuesday morning the lump had shrunk to the size of a grape, so I cancelled my doctor’s appointment. By Wednesday, the lump was gone.” Carol’s healing went beyond the disappearance of the lump: relationships with family and friends were renewed. Today she enjoys open and free fellowship with them.

Inner Healing

For years an irrational fear that God and her friends would abandon her lurked under the surface of Carol’s strong and gifted personality. The apparent loss of family and friends by their move to the other church was tailor-made to bring out anxieties and to affect her behavior. That fear, when left to run its course, led to loneliness, depression, avoidance of friends, and a lack of trust in God. The final symptom was the lump in her breast.

When Carol focused on God’s promise that he would never leave her, and when she repented of her sinful attitudes and actions toward her sisters and friends, she received Christ’s forgiveness and was healed of psychological and emotional damage that had its roots in childhood experiences. She no longer saw herself as a victim of past hurts; their significance receded as she began to see past experience from God’s perspective.

A by-product of her healing was renewed relationships. Relating well to others in an open, free, caring, and trusting way reinforced the healing that she received when she repented and believed God’s truth. Now Carol’s friends tell her that neither then nor God will ever abandon her.

Emotional and psychological hurts linger in the form of bad memories (thoughts of hurtful experiences from the past) and form barriers to personal growth. They may even lead us into various forms of sin, emotional problems, and physical illnesses.

Emotional and psychological hurts, including bad memories, are caused both by our sin and by our being sinned against. The healing of these past hurts restores the inward (unseen and unseeable) part of men and women, as opposed to purely physical, visible, or outward healing. Therefore, the healing of past hurts is commonly called “inner healing.

I define inner healing as “a process in which the Holy Spirit brings forgiveness of sins and emotional renewal to people suffering from damaged minds, wills, and emotions.” It is a way of bringing the power of the gospel to a specific area of need.

Healing with a Purpose

The Purpose and goal of inner healing is emotionally healthy persons, people who are released from the emotional and psychological bondage that past experiences have produced. I use the term “emotions” in a broad sense that includes all the internal reactions we feel to situations around us or to things happening in ourselves. Emotions are inner reactions that we are conscious of and that influence our behavior.

I make a distinction between reactions and responses. An emotion is our reaction; what we do or say is our response. In some ways this distinction is not always clear to us, because it is not always easy to distinguish exactly which emotion we are having that is causing a certain response or why we are having it. But this distinction is helpful because it underlines something that is crucial about the healing of past hurts: our goal is to have emotional reactions that reinforce the love of God and neighbor, so that negative reactions that lead us astray are not out of control.

Emotionally healthy persons are: